SENTIMENTALITY WATERS DOWN A WELL-MEANT MESSAGE

By John J. O'Connor

Published: October 13, 1985

Do your own thing, young people were being told in the permissive 1960's. Watch out, parents are people too, they are being warned in the conservative 1980's. That, at least, is the message being spelled out, rather laboriously, in ''Toughlove,'' tonight's ABC Theater presentation at 9 o'clock. Just a few years ago, a TV movie could show - as one starring Martin Sheen did - an overly strict father being taught a lesson when his troublesome teen-age son attempted suicide after Dad decided not to bail him out of jail. Toughness was no solution in those days. Today, apparently, it is becoming almost fashionable, endorsed at press conferences by movie stars like Lee Remick and Bruce Dern, who happen to be the stars of ''Toughlove.''

They play Jan and Rob Charters, a suburban middle-class couple with two teen-age sons: the exemplary Scott (Eric Schiff) and his drug-abusing older brother Gary (Jason Patric). Rob Charters is an assistant high-school principal. His wife is a reporter for the local paper. She begins to get suspicious about the increasingly withdrawn Gary after catching him in a series of lies about what he is doing in his spare time. Rob is not convinced, insisting that spotting troubled kids is what he does for a living. Growing more concerned, Jan finally comes across a flyer for an organization called Toughlove. ''Troubled by your teen-ager's behavior?'' it asks. ''Come to a meeting at the First Presbyterian Church.''

Toughlove really exists and is said to have 1,500 chapters ''touching some half-million lives'' in this country and abroad. The organization was founded in 1980 in Philadelphia by David and Phyllis York, professional counselors, and was born out of an experience they had with their own daughter. While urging parents to remain loving, the program, which is controversial in that it's techniques are considered questionable by a good number of experts, advises them to stop being intimidated and manipulated by their misbehaving children. It is the parents who must become stronger while devising new mechanisms for giving their children firm and selective support. As someone says at a meeting in this movie, ''It doesn't matter how [the youth] got that way, we're going to put an end to it -parents are people too.'' Freud and counseling are out. Rules and regulations are in. This isn't an entirely new subject for television drama. Last January, a CBS TV-movie called ''Not My Kid,'' starring George Segal and Stockard Channing as the parents, offered a remarkably similar story (although the name of the support group wasn't specified). But the basic message is now being delivered more urgently, less apologetically. The portrayed parents no longer buy the arguments that their children are going through a normal stage of adolescent rebelliousness. The problems today are different. It's not just a matter of skipping school and smoking cigarettes. Now there are drugs, addictive chemicals that can destroy lives. Sometimes, goes the Toughlove theory, understanding, reasoning and tender loving care are not enough.

This stern doctrine is hammered home as Rob and Jan set about trying to salvage the life of their son Gary. Taking Toughlove's advice, they decide to precipitate a crisis themselves, to ''let the bomb explode and let Gary pick up the pieces.'' When the young man is arrested for attempted burglary, the parents refuse to go to the local precinct station, telling the police to keep him in custody. They don't even attend his trial, sending instead ''support parents'' from their Toughlove group. When Gary calls home for help, his mother hangs up on him. When he finally gets out and returns home, he is offered a formal contract that specifies no more breaking curfew, no more drugs and the necessity to attend a rehabilitation center. The method has its risks, of course, as Gary's parents find out when their infuriated son simply runs away from home.

The sensitive question of Toughlove's overall effectiveness is carefully fudged in the film. In addition to the Charters and their son Gary, Karen Hall's screenplay provides the parallel and overlapping case of Darlene Marsh (Piper Laurie), a single parent, and her runaway daughter Kristin (Dedee Pfeiffer). Doing her best to look like the pop singer Madonna, Kristin has taken a fancy to Gary and is luring him further into the drug scene. Her mother believes firmly in the Toughlove method and is instrumental in converting Gary's parents to the cause. Darlene follows the program's precepts, but the risks have tragic consequences. Her daughter ends up dead of a drug overdose.

Directed by Glenn Jordan for Fries Entertainment, ''Toughlove'' is only sporadically as powerful as it obviously intended to be. One problem is that is has the look of the typical TV movie, a kind of sanitized version of reality. Problems are reviewed but not forcefully conveyed. For stark contrast, an import from British television that was recently shown on public-TV's WNET looked at rebellious youth from another angle and left the viewer with a string of searing images. ''Made in Britain,'' produced in 1982, showed an incorrigible youth in confrontation with a wide range of authorities, some of them soft, some of them vicious. There was clearly no answer for this particular case. He would have sneered Toughlove into oblivion. But no one is likely to forget him or his unsettling story. Which points up another problem about the average TV movie: its compulsion to leave the audience heartwarmed. True to form, ''Toughlove'' does come up with the happy ending. There is a family reconciliation, even though it would appear to break the rules being advocated by the Toughlove organization. A runaway youth is not allowed to simply return home. He must first spend time with Toughlove support parents or in a rehabilitation center. But television, dripping sentimentality, gives us Gary conceding that ''I know I want to come back and I know what the rules are.'' In addition, it happens to be Christmas Day. The time is long past due, it would seem, for someone to get tough with the networks about the abuse of tired formulas.